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Wednesday, 20 August 2014

This month's question:
What
strategies do you use when writing for dissemination? This month, the
SoTL section of the newsletter is focussed on writing tips – is there
anything you can add for the benefit of the community? Reply to SaMnet
and you might see your name in the next newsletter!

Correction:
Last month we congratulated the new OLT National Teaching Fellows
who have been a part of SaMnet. We referred to John Willison of the
University of Adelaide as “Joe”. We apologise for the mistake.

Members
of the SaMnet project team will be submitting a publication regarding a
particular facet of collaboration within the SaMnet project teams by
the end of August. Look forward to reading this in the coming months.

This month we focus on writing SoTL and tips and tricks to increase your output:Turbocharge your writing todayMaria Gardner, Hugh Kearns
Although
technically targeted at PhD students, this article provides some great
suggestions on becoming more efficient at writing papers. The authors
dispel some of the myths of academic writing, discuss how to optimise
your writing time and propose their top tips for getting out of a
writing rut.

Habits of highly productive writers
In
this video Jan McLean from UNSW’s Teaching and Learning unit interviews
Helen Sword about the findings from her latest research project, a
series of interviews with productive academic writers from around the
world. Helen is an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland
with research interests in higher education pedagogy and academic
writing.

Be a leader people want to work forConnect: Professional Women’s Network
A
series of tips from women in leadership about how to make the
transition from being a member of a work group to being a leader of a
work group.

7. Initiative in Focus: 2013 OLT National Fellowship Update: Using Cultural Capital to Drive ChangeManju Sharma (The University of Sydney) with Helen Georgiou:
As
part of this fellowship, focused on surveying and improving the quality
of undergraduate lectures in science, several initiatives were enacted.
The objectives included
identifying good practices and fostering partnerships amongst academics to share them,
developing strategies to enlist hesitant academics who are open to change, and
supporting policy efforts through advocacy within the local institutions.
The
initiatives enacted to achieve these objectives included the
observation and characterization of undergraduate lectures to paint a
picture of pedagogical approaches utilized across the nation in science
courses and the local implementation of a 'Peer Review of Teaching'
program to create a culture of discussion around teaching; and an
ambitious, collaborative effort to measure student outcomes in a range
of undergraduate chemistry and physics lectures across the nation using
existing concept inventories/surveys.

The broad results from
this project indicate that innovative, evidence-based and
technologically robust practices are occurring in the majority of first
year science lectures, however, lecturers reveal that there are
obstacles to conducting evaluations of these programs -for various
reasons -and in getting colleagues on board. Lecture strategies such as
clickers, the use of iPads or laptops, adaptations of the flipped
lecture approach, mastery learning approaches and blended learning
environments for lectures are amongst some of the approaches used.
Evaluation, and subsequent communication and dissemination of successful
practices are vital if local success is to be converted into widespread
improvements in lectures. Details of a model of how this might occur
will be discussed.

8. Classifieds

Survey Participation: Academic Labour and Lifestyles Survey
Researchers
from Monash University are conducting an investigation to better
understand how academics experience work/life balance in their everyday
duties and career paths. In order to explore this better, we are looking
for current academics of all ages and stages in their career to take a
short 15 minute survey located here. Contact Fabian Cannizzo if you have queries.

Support for this project/activity has been provided by the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching. The views in this project do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching.